An award-winning researcher and writer, McDonald co-founded the environmental justice movement in the 1980s when he helped lead the fight to create the EPA Office of Environmental Justice, advocated for green jobs programs in poor and minority communities, and oversaw the first comprehensive study of pollution in Washington, D.C.

McDonald and his work are regularly featured in national media including ABC, NBC, CBS, New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Baltimore Sun, and the Los Angeles Times.

McDonald was the first environmentalist and environmental justice activist to support nuclear power plants for their clean air benefits. An asthma sufferer, McDonald has made the case for nuclear as a clean air and climate mitigation technology on NPR and in other news media, has visited nuclear plants in China, and France, and is working to prevent the premature closure of nuclear power plants.

McDonald has served as member of the Maryland Governor's Environmental Justice Advisory Committee, EPA Water Conservation Advisory Committee, Maryland State Water Quality Advisory Committee, and as chairman of the board of the ACLU of Prince George’s County, served on the board of directors of the Accokeek Foundation and advisory board of Environmental Progress.

With college interns after a creek walk on the bank of Lower Beaverdam Creek, a tributary to the Anacostia River in Washington, DC

McDonald has long combined his commitment to social justice and his love of nature by leading hands-on grassroots efforts for recycling, home weatherization and audits in poor neighborhoods. For more than three decades McDonald has led visits to toxic waste sites, power plants, drinking-water plants, sewage treatment plants, and creek walks all that exposed white environmentalists to the realities of poor communities of color.

From 1979 to 1986, McDonald directed the Energy Conservation and Transportation program at the Environmental Policy Institute (EPI), which later merged with Friends of the Earth (FOE). McDonald helped lead the fight in Congress in the early 1980s to maintain Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, testifying before Congress as well as federal and state agencies. And McDonald successfully advocated for the 1986 Federal Shared Energy Savings Act.

McDonald is a certified Hazardous Waste Site Inspector, and was a National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) instructor in 1997 for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Graduate School. In 2002, McDonald helped pass the first civil rights law of the 21st Century, the No Fear Act. McDonald started one of the first minority environmental internship programs in 1989, which placed black college students in national environmental groups.

McDonald spends most of the year on Catalina Island, off the coast of southern California, and Washington, D.C.